Civil War Archive to Go on Sale

Forgotten archives related to black Civil War soldiers are coming on the market in the next few weeks.

On Feb. 5, James D. Julia Auctioneers
in Fairfield, Me., will offer two batches of paperwork and artifacts
from Luis F. Emilio, a white Army captain from Massachusetts who led
African-American troops. His vivid 1890s memoir, “A Brave Black
Regiment: History of the Fifty-Fourth Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry,
1863-1865,” details the Army’s casualties as storms descended on South
Carolina swamps, food supplies dwindled, and petty thieves stole from
corpses on battlefields.

But
when he enlisted, as a teenager, he was optimistic. “The sailing was
fine and sea smooth,” he wrote to his parents, just after the regiment
set off from Boston on a steamer with private staterooms for the
officers. “The War will be a short one,” he predicted to his parents.

Descendants
had long preserved the material, and two unnamed current owners, who
are unrelated to the Emilio family, have consigned the trove to the
Julia sale. The two auction lots (estimated between $40,000 and $120,000
each) contain Captain Emilio’s stirrups, diaries, medals, newspaper
clippings, leather documents box, hand-drawn battlefield maps and
uniform trim made of palm fronds harvested in South Carolina....